Wtf does 'the immigrant experience' even mean?

We’re kicking off Friday Talks, S2: Not Bad For Some Immigrants with a conversation about ‘the immigrant experience,’ Or rather, why there’s no such things as a singular immigrant experience, even though we’re often told all immigrants go through the same things (think: hardship, culture shock and striving to assimilate).

Author and public speaker Bee Quammie, journalist Pacinthe Mattar and Friday Things assistant editor Ruth Young join Stacy Lee Kong for a candid chat about their varied immigrant experiences, from growing up second-gen and wishing ‘immigrant’ was a label that applied, to identifying as a third-culture kid who doesn’t seem herself as an immigrant at all, to being an immigrant who isn’t perceived as one.

The goal? To expand the conversations we have about immigrants and better reflect our complex, nuanced, unique stories. Because, as Quammie argues, we lose so much when we default to simplistic narratives about the hardship immigrants go through.

“Within Canada, we’re losing the opportunity for this country to literally be the best the fit could be. We’re doing this marketing campaign. We’re getting the bodies in. But then we don’t want you to really do what you feel you need to do, and Canada is so stunted by that,” she says.

ABOUT FRIDAY TALKS

Hosted by Friday Things founder and editor Stacy Lee Kong, 'Not Bad For Some Immigrants' is a six-part video series about the stories we tell about immigrants in pop culture, media and real life. It rejects the focus on striving—to succeed, to assimilate, to be judged worthy of belonging in, and to, our new homes—that so often infiltrate stories about our experiences, and instead makes space for complicated, nuanced and joyful conversations about what it actually costs to build a new life, the stories we learn to tell about ourselves and what it really means to belong.